Origami + Robotics = CSAIL's Printable Robots!

If you thought #-Link-Snipped-# and #-Link-Snipped-# are cool, we've an exciting update for you from the #-Link-Snipped-# Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (#-Link-Snipped-#). Engineers at MIT are working on a $10 million ambitious project to rediscover the way robots are designed and manufactured. National Science Foundation (NSF) is financing the project and the main aim of this project is to simply the whole process of robot design so that any average person can design, customize and print a robot in a matter of few hours. MIT professor  Daniela Rus is leading this project believes that this project can have a profound effect on the society as efforts are on to democratize the acces to robots.


Photo By Jason Dorfman, CSAIL/MIT

The project is titled "An Expedition in Computing for Compiling Printable Programmable Machines" and has brought together the best of the minds from MIT, University Of Pennsylvania and Harvard. The team is currently working on automating the process of creating functional 3D devices from easily available material like sheets of paper. The vision of this project is to create an end-to-end process; right from a compiler to build physical machines.

As a part of this project, the researchers will create an API to allow simple functional specifications, designing and writing algorithms. Check out following video that shows printable robots in action:-

<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cRVnxbO69pY?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" width="640" height="360"></iframe>